


all our brittle hearts can bear

by recycledstars



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 09:03:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2726582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recycledstars/pseuds/recycledstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>If God is speaking to her she’s not sure she likes what He’s saying.</i> Post-ep for 3.04.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all our brittle hearts can bear

**Author's Note:**

> So, the Catholic thing [bothered](http://recycledstars.tumblr.com/post/104068823193) [me](http://recycledstars.tumblr.com/post/104293682223) (I acknowledge, to a truly absurd degree) so after taking it way too personally I sat down and wrote this because therapy is more expensive than fic. Also that ending was deliciously angsty and I absolutely 100% live for that shit. 
> 
>  [My writing playlist, just because.](http://8tracks.com/recycledstars/all-our-brittle-hearts-can-bear)

 

The first night is fine until 1 AM. But for one moment, changing out of her wedding dress alone in the bathroom at ACN which is so emphatically not how the scene is supposed to play that she cries, quietly, for half a minute … but for _that_ moment she doesn’t feel a thing.

After she wipes her eyes she changes back into her work clothes, back into her real life, because it’s time to do the news.

And she does. Without him.

 

 

It’s Friday night so the staff go out for drinks after the show. She refuses their invitations one by one, goes home alone and sorts through their mail and throws out all the takeout boxes piling up in the half-finished kitchen. She picks up all the clothes on the floor (his) and the back of the chair in the corner (hers), sets aside the dry cleaning and sorts laundry into lights and darks and straightens whatever she can find to straighten.

They have no furniture though, no _things_ ; everything is still packed up in boxes in storage and not for the first time she thinks they’re mad for moving into the apartment exactly as they bought it.

(Gutted, and that had felt like a metaphor, after six years they’d move in together and start over, build from the ground up. He had practical reasons – it was the right time to sell his apartment, there wasn’t enough space for both of them in hers, they couldn’t agree on anything in any of the places they’d seen that had walls and working light fixtures, so much so that she thinks the realtor might have shed a private tear after the 27th failure – and she liked the symbolism of it.)

At the time Charlie had told them they were crazy, and they probably should have listened but between them they’re still only one-for-two in _older and wiser_.

So there’s not really all that much to tidy. She goes to bed early.

 

 

She goes to bed early and feels nothing until she’s lying awake, unable to get comfortable, hand fisting in the sheets and remembering –

Her body on his, sitting up in their bed and not at the best angle (he’s right, they need _walls_ , something to lean against) but this way she could kiss him, look at him as best she could in the dark and the lights were off because she couldn’t look at him _properly_. Not when –

She was counting the hours.

Her hands holding his face and his, at her back, hugging her close, searching for her hair. He’d taken handfuls of it when she’d pushed him back against the mattress with a sudden hunger, breathing ragged, on a knife edge, trembling and she couldn’t tell if it was because close to orgasm or close to crying.

She was trying so hard not to cry. For him.

But she was only sobbing with need, more contact, _more_. More of his hand, awkwardly wedged between them, until she curled over him, felt like she was _breaking_ , _la petite_ fucking _mort_ and it felt like she wasn’t breathing at all even though she was, hard and fast and shallow.     

He rolled them over while she was still trembling and she’d pulled him down against her, kissed him hard.

“Give me something to remember you by,” she’d said, before he had a chance to ask her if she was okay as if the answer to _that_ wasn’t obvious.

And he had and she whispered encouraging things in his ear, hands in his hair, until he went still against her, face buried in her neck. She hugged him to her.

“I love you,” she murmured, too quietly for him to hear. 

He tried to move off her but she held him tighter.

“No.” _Don’t go_ , _don’t leave me again_. “Don’t move.”

So they lay like that, bodies joined, tessellating shapes made of flesh and bone and sin, and she was thinking on that last one, half asleep, her heart a prisoner in her chest, fists rattling its cage, singing so softly about being free.

 _I want to marry you tomorrow_.

She nearly said it but he was snoring lightly into her neck and all she wanted was to stretch the moment out into forever, unraveling it slowly like an endless piece of string.

And suddenly she has no morals, no high-minded ideals. It’s just _get him home_ and she doesn’t give a damn about the rest.

That’s all it takes, a fucking memory at one in the morning. Mac has spent her entire life standing for something. She _believes_ the world can change, she thinks they were doing their small part to change it. But the world and everything in it can go to hell for everything it’s done to her.

It makes her sick, how easily she gives it all up. This is what she’s always been afraid of, that love would ruin her. That she wouldn’t stand for anything because all that would matter would be _him_.

(Because she can’t change the world without him. She just _can’t_.)

So she turns on the one lamp that works in the corner of the room and writes it all down, everything she knows about Lilly, about Neal, about the story, all of it. She can end it right now, or, in the morning. Just hand it all over to the DOJ and he can come home and be somebody’s husband, hers.

At 2 AM she nearly calls Rebecca, paces through the rooms of their wall-less apartment, thumb on the call button for five then ten then fifteen minutes until she ends up back where she started at the foot of the bed.

 _You can’t ever repeat what you just said_.

(He asked her to promise. _Promise me you won’t_.)

She throws down the phone and crawls under the covers, draws his pillow to her chest and stares at the ceiling thinking that as long as she doesn’t move, doesn’t roll on her side or shift at all, then she won’t cry.

It’s only a moment of weakness though. She wakes up at 4 AM and tears the pages into neat, tiny shreds, lets them fall like confetti all over their bed.

 

 

On Saturday morning Maggie and Sloan show up at the front door, insistent about yoga class, which is the last thing she needs, to _relax_. She has a sense that the tension is what's keeping her numb, and _that's_ what's keeping her together. But they're impossible to dissuade, and they keep up a steady stream of chatter about the apartment and then nothing in particular right up until they’re shushed by the instructor.

Afterward they talk her into lunch. And then Maggie needs new shoes so there's _shopping_ and she honestly thinks they're going to find a way to invite themselves to spend the night in her living room. Mac does love them for it, but she’s _fine_ , really.

She's going to read _War and Peace_ and finish the apartment and she probably won't even have time to do either of those things.

Molly said ten days.

Instead of reading Tolstoy though she stays awake until the battery of her Macbook is drained, browsing federal case law, trying to clarify the murky distinction between civil vs. criminal contempt. And finding all the cases she can of reporters being charged: Judith Miller was jailed for 85 days and she finds a Texas author jailed for 168 for refusing to give up sources in a murder case and ...

It's been _one_ day. And she’s _fine_ , really. But she can't imagine one hundred and sixty seven more.

 

 

On Sunday she goes to church, even though it’s not Christmas and she’s not at her grandmother’s house. She’s been thinking about God lately, because of the wedding, about the God of her mother, her father, their parents and their parents. Religion is history, generations linked by a book with timeless themes. She’s been thinking about God and churches, the burden and joy of traditions, religion as more than faith.

(Faith she has, always has had. She’s always seen God in details and again in sweeping themes, in a practical, everyday sort of way; the world spins on and all His children in it. But the traditions in which she was raised all conflict. The Gods of her mother, her father, their parents and their parents are all different.)

It’s the fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time so she sits through 1 Corinthians 7 – _those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this_ – another brush with that Almighty sense of humour. If God is speaking to her she’s not sure she likes what He’s saying.

Mac finds Paul’s letters a little hit and miss. She doesn’t really listen, because it’s not really about the practice but the custom, the comfort of a ritual, the idea that her mother’s mother and her father’s mother and all their mothers before sat in churches like this one, listened to these words while their husbands and sons went off to wars from which they never returned.

(Will’s coming home. She had great uncles and second cousins that didn’t.)

She thinks about women and history, the strength it takes to be idle, to hold everything together while men play heroes, always doing the real work, making but never remembered by history.

Mac has been making history by telling it for years but she’s never wanted to be the person the world was watching. She’s always been proud that Will is, that he stands up and gives all their ideas voice. But just this once she wishes he wouldn’t or that he hadn’t.

She thinks about his family too, hers now, by extension. About the generations of their blood relatives never met but were all unified in this tradition, this church they share, but now there’s an official record because of their – his and her – marriage.

On this day, in this year, 2013 _Anno Domini_.

And she thinks about the 300 people coming to a wedding in a church her mother doesn’t approve of but would make _his_ mother happy. (His mother, a woman she will never meet but she feels like she knows because she haunts all her children. Will doesn’t know what to do with her memory so she, MacKenzie, decided they would honor it in this small way.)

Then she stares at her hands, both the rings on one finger, and she moves the engagement ring back to her right.

 

 

On Monday Maggie brings her a wire report and pitches a story about the Islamist insurgency in Nigeria. There’s not enough of an American slant so she says, “Alright, Friday. Maybe.”

And Maggie looks happy about that, which makes her suspicious. Sure enough, she’s followed by each of the staff in turn, all wanting to put together longer-form segments:

Garry has a new angle on Israeli airstrikes on Damascus and wants to put together some background on it. Tess wants a segment on private colleges. Kendra has some changes to public housing policy that she thinks deserve scrutiny. Martin brings her a story about a nun on trial for interfering with national security after breaking into a nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee. (A story which gets more ridiculous with every sentence.) Jim brings her a Pentagon report into sexual assault in the military.

And, completely coincidentally she’s sure, they all need a lot more guidance than usual. Especially after she’s gone home for the evening and on weekends.

 

 

After they’ve been married for one week she finally gets to see him, and he takes her hands and runs his thumbs over the rings on both of them. He taps at her engagement ring. “Aren’t you meant to wear them on the same finger now?”

“I will.” She takes a breath,  “After we get married.”

“Honey, we already …”

“Properly. In a church.”

“Are you saying you only feel married to me in the eyes of the state and not in the eyes of God?” he asks her. “I even talked the priest into a special exception for you.”

“Okay, then let’s switch places. _I’ll_ go to jail and you can tell my mother we got married six weeks early without her present.”

(As she suspected, he flinches at the thought of _that_ trade.)

“So what, we’re going to do the whole thing again on her account?”

“And the other 290 people who couldn’t make it the first time.” She looks at him, imploring, hoping he’ll see what she doesn’t want to say: _it’s just easier this way_. It gives her something to do. Besides she’s not exactly sure what the polite way to go about cancelling a wedding _is_ and she doesn’t have time to write to Peggy Post. “I don’t see the point in cancelling it; it’s _weeks_ from now. Most people have already booked their travel and it’s _paid_ for so…”

“I might have this one minor scheduling conflict.”

“You’ll be out by then.”

“If I’m not?”

“We’ll be sure to have fun without you. I’ll send you the pictures.”

He looks like he’s about to argue with her further so she ambushes him with paint colors for the living room, purposefully goads him with an ostentatious shade of lime green which he really should know she also hates and maybe he does, but he takes the bait anyway.

There’s no use talking about the rest of it. She doesn’t know what else they could say.

 

 

It happens overnight, that everyone is on their side again. Journalists and concerned citizens, their competitors, everyone. And hell, even Republicans start taking cheap shots at the administration. It’s a sweet spot in the political cycle though, midway between elections, so there’s only so much weight to bad press. There’s still more than enough time for it to be done and dusted so the public can forget about it.

But they can fucking forget about that. She knows people. She’ll have them writing until 2016 if she has to.

 _Don’t talk to the press_ is what Pruit tells them. But _fuck that_ , she _is_ the press. So she leaks everything she can to the people that she trusts. _You can’t use my name_ she says, over and over.

She tells the staff: "I know you're all probably being harangued by everyone you know for comments. So I want you to direct any requests to me and I'll handle them."

Headline after headline after headline, she creates her huge conversation.

"Charlie sent me a quote from the _Times_ the other day,” he says, “I think it was _we're being censored by the government and by corporate interests simultaneously, it’s the mire of modern journalism._ A senior staffer at ACN who didn't wish to be named. Is it you or is it Don?"

"Pruit instructed us not to comment."

He raises his eyebrows at her.

In their two hour argument about covert operations: _I understand the need for the government to act secretly at times, but if retrospectively, you can't tell your constituents what you've done then there's probably a good reason and that reason is that what you've done is wrong_.

If you can't say what you've done, you've probably done something wrong.

Well Augustine was on to something; Lord make me a saint, but not yet.

She gives him her sweetest, most innocent smile. Then rolls her eyes: “Don wouldn’t say _mire_.”

 

 

After eighteen days she moves out of the apartment and into a hotel and tells herself it’s because it’s easier when the contractors don’t have to work around her, but really it’s because he’s not there and he’s meant to be; it’s _their apartment_.

(Not his, not hers. They were meant to be starting over.)

And when she’s there alone she finds herself missing _her_ apartment, _her_ life. Because he’s gone and she can’t stand the absence of him and she didn’t even notice it happening, him seeping into every inch of her and now she doesn’t recognize herself. Like Lady fucking Macbeth and _out, damn'd spot._

It’s only been six months and it was _six years_. Yet who would have thought it would be so easy, to forget how to be alone and to remember how to miss him?

She spends three days blindingly angry with him for that.

 _War and Peace_ is tedious. She rents the movie instead.

 

 

She grips his hands until her knuckles are white. Seven days since she’s seen him and seven days of searching for something to hold onto; it’s been three weeks since he’s been in prison and for this one hour a week it gets to be him, that she holds onto. So she does.

“Sometimes I think,” she pauses, lowers her voice. “I could end this.”

“Mac.”

“And I think that _would_ make me a bad person. It wouldn’t be you over the story or the story over you. I’d be doing it all for myself.” She can’t look at him so she stares blankly at the walls and the walls stare blankly back. “Selfishly. I miss you. So sometimes I think … you know, I could decide for both of us.”

“You’d never do that,” he says, so certain, and she worries that he still idolizes her, still thinks she’s perfect, still wants to be perfect for _her_ and … they’re meant to be past all that. (He’s not meant to think she’s perfect; she’s so worried he’s going to punish her when he realizes that she isn’t.)

“Would you still want to be married to me?” she asks. “If I did?”

“Doesn’t matter either way, you wanted to get married in the church with no get out of jail free card.”

Which is an unfortunate choice of words.

“I don’t know. We haven’t consummated it yet, you could still ask for an annulment.”

“Please don’t torture me with the thought.” He groans. “I miss you too.”

“I knew you were only in it for my – ”

“Nubile, young body. Don’t forget it.”

They smile at each other and she thinks, _no get out of jail free card_. The first conversation they’d had on that score had been over lunch or what she thought of as “lunch” and he thought of as “an approximation” of the same –

He had read the label aloud and she corrected his pronunciation: “It’s _quinoa_.”

"What the fuck is quinoa?"

"Delicious?" she suggested with a hopeful smile.

"Nice try."

"Really," she insisted, taking a forkful for herself.

“New rule: if I can’t pronounce the name, I’m not eating it.”

“Then you’re going to have a terrible time in Paris,” she remarked, smirking at his expense as she chewed.

“Let’s hold off the travel plans for a moment and finishing planning the wedding before we discuss the honeymoon. You want to get married in a church?"

"Why would you think that I wouldn't?"

“What all this has taught me is that I find it incredibly difficult to predict what you do and don't want.” He leaned across the table toward her to clarify, looking like he was still a little unsure of what he was hearing: “A Catholic church?”

“ _Yes_.”

“You want a Catholic service?” 

(He was exasperated with her on all fronts at that lunch meeting-slash-wedding planning session.)

She set down the salad and folded her arms. "Are you trying to make sure there's still a way out?"

"No. But you're so –”

He was searching for a way to say it politely, and she knew exactly what he was thinking – that her family had a lot more money than his did and she was a little WASPy – so she let him struggle without helping him out of it. She quirked an eyebrow. "Yes?"

" _Protestant_ ," he settled on, finally.

"On my mother’s side _yes_. But on my father’s it’s more or less half-and-half. And he _was_ Catholic, it was only because he wanted to divorce Emily that –"

“That's the founding premise of the entire Church of England. You’re going to have to do a little better than that.”

He was a little superior about it; spoken like a _true_ member of the Holy Roman Church and that brought her to her next point, which was:

“ _You’re_ Catholic.”

“Technically speaking. But _you’re_ not. And since I know my only role in all this is to show up where and when you tell me to wearing a suit, I’m happy to be at your mercy. Also Episcopalians tend to be a bit laxer about who can be on the guest list for their sacraments and since you were raised in the Anglican tradition –” 

“I don’t see why it matters so much.”

“That’s because you’re not Catholic.”

“My grandmother was and my older sisters and my brother are and ….”

“The Holy See isn’t going to care about any of that. We’re a petty bunch.” At her not-at-all-amused look, he held up his hands. “Hey, I’m with you. I think there are a lot of oddly specific, arbitrary rules that seem like they’d be a little inconsequential to an omnipotent God. But this is what you’re signing up for.” Then he teased her: “Are you in it for the Vatican’s stance on prophylactics?”

She kicked him under the table.

He made a face at her. “You know they’re going to make us interview for the privilege. And since the last time either of us stood a foot in a Catholic church was me, at my father’s funeral, there’s gonna be homework.”

“Are you done?”

“I told you, my only role here is to give you anything and everything you want. So I’ll do the homework, but you’re not copying my answers in the hall.”

“What makes you think I’d need to?”

“MacKenzie, Irish Catholicism isn’t taught, it’s inflicted. Years and years of psychological – ”

She had shoved the carton back in his direction with vehemence. “Eat your quinoa.”

He draws her back to the present.

“There is no world, no alternate, parallel universe in which you would do that. And there’s no world, alternate, parallel universe where I wouldn’t want to be married to you.” He brings her hands to his lips, kisses her fingertips, then rests them back on the table before they get in trouble. “Just … doesn’t exist.”

 

 

Her father’s first wife was Catholic. It was something she had been told as a child too young to understand the broader implications, all it meant to her was that once at Christmastime her father had a fight with her half-sister, his oldest daughter, about taking communion at an Anglican mass.  Which at five years old seemed to her to be the least of the complaints to be made about mass on Christmas morning: the frills on her socks itched, there were presents to open and she was still too young to take communion at all so she felt very left out.

Catherine had explained it to her when she asked though – Catholics believe in transubstantiation, the Eucharist as the body and the blood of Christ. It horrified her for years, and she’d fought passionately against Confirmation until her mother had promised her that _they didn’t believe that_. (And told her she’d get a new dress.)

When she was older she learned that people were killing each other over it in Northern Island. Her father disapproved loudly and so she did too. When she was older still, old enough to have her own opinions, she thought it was a rather esoteric difference to plant a car bomb over.

 

 

She starts going to the gym twice a day for something to do, so she's so exhausted she can't help but fall asleep as soon as she gets home. And she’s never hungry anymore. So the wedding dress she chose five months ago doesn’t fit, to a rather alarming degree.

She’s spent six months finding good omens, noticing coincidences as though they’re proof of concept, that _this can work_ , that she’s finally allowed to be happy.

Now her wedding dress doesn’t fit and he’s not there but the apartment is close to finished.

She moves back in and stops looking for signs.

If God is speaking to her she’s not sure she likes what He’s saying.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Think again mofo, I can out-God anyone in the ... I don't know where I was going with that. Anyway, there's a little bit more to come, but I wanted to at least start posting before 3.05 airs. And in a fucking gift from the universe, [Martin's nun story is real](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/defendants-no-remorse-weapons-plant-break) and should absolutely be made into a blockbuster as _soon as humanly possible._


End file.
